Sometimes people just think themselves cleverer than they are. Twitchy highlights this leftover from yesterday involving the most prominent House Democrat grandstander in a House Oversight Committee hearing. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played a â€ścorruption gameâ€ť with a panel of ethics experts that ignores basic civics and, as one witness later noted, the actual facts of campaign finance.But AOCâ€™s supporters were certainly stoked about the first â€ślightning roundâ€ť of game: Oh my god. This is just sensational. Please watch and retweet. pic.twitter.com/ackPHwAUceâ€” James Corden (@JKCorden) February 7, 2019 Â“LetÂ’s play a lightning round game,â€ť Ocasio-Cortez began. â€śIÂ’m gonna be the...

Donald Trumpâ€™s not the only one asking this question, although he has the most self-interest in asking it. â€śI never directed Michael Cohen to break the law,â€ť Trump started in laying out his case on Twitter, and then argued that not all the acts to which Cohen pled guilty should have been crimes in the first place. Trump took aim at his biggest legal liability so far â€” the payoffs that kept his former paramours from talking publicly about his infidelities. How could those possibly be campaign-finance violations, especially in a criminal context? I never directed Michael Cohen to...

Donald Trump’s wayward counsel, Michael Cohen, was sentenced today as part of a plea bargain with the government. As part of that settlement, Cohen has admitted to criminal violations of federal campaign-finance law and has implicated President Trump in those violations. The press is ablaze with headlines trumpeting the president’s possible involvement in two felony campaign-finance violations. The source of these violations are Mr. Cohen’s arranging — allegedly at Trump’s direction — hush-money payments to women alleging long-ago affairs with the 2016 presidential candidate. The Federal Election Campaign Act holds that an “expenditure” is any “purchase, payment, loan, advance, deposit...

President Obama’s campaign has agreed to pay a $375,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission, among the largest penalties in the agency’s history. The fine was imposed after an audit of the campaign’s books showed that it failed to report the identities of donors who gave large checks in the weeks before the 2008 election, according to a copy of the agreement between the FEC and the president’s campaign. The document shows that the Obama campaign failed to disclose the identities of donors responsible for $2 million in contributions in the weeks ahead of the election. The campaign also misreported...

If Mueller's witch hunt is dumb enough to try and take down Trump by claiming that hush money paid to the two women was a campaign finance law violation, then Mueller must also go after all the Congressmen who secretly used taxpayer funds to silence claims against them of sexual harassment. Such a secret use of taxpayer funds is also embezzlement and they all should be prosecuted.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Sunday criticized the Maine progressive groups that have pledged millions of dollars to her 2020 opponent in opposition to her vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Collins on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday called the crowdfunding effort an attempt to "buy votes and buy positions." She said it did not influence her decision to vote in Kavanaugh's favor. "This is a classic quid pro quo as defined in our bribery laws," Collins said. "They are asking me to perform an official act and if I do not do what they want, two million plus...

Summary: Same law firm paid for dossier that paid the DNC server "investigation." STORY: As Rich noted last night, we have learned finally, courtesy of the Washington Post, that Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the notorious “Trump Dossier,” was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign and the DNC always want layers of deniability and obfuscation – and let’s note that it has served them well – so they hire lawyers to do the icky stuff rather than doing it directly. Then, when the you-know-what hits the fan,...

Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, is “pleading guilty to a crime that doesn’t exist” to further Democrats’ plans to impeach the president. He offered his analysis during a Wednesday interview with Breitbart Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight. “I don’t think there’s an impeachable offense,” said Dershowitz. “I believe you need to have a specific crime — treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors — and none of the things that [Michael] Cohen pleaded guilty to would rise to that level or even...

A few things are clear. A candidate is free to contribute to his or her own campaign. It also is not criminal for a candidate to pay hush money to women whose disclosures might endanger his campaign. So if candidate Trump paid hush money to his two accusers, there would be no violation of any campaign or other laws. To be sure, if he did so for the purpose of helping his campaign — as distinguished from helping his marriage — his campaign would have to disclose any such contribution, and failure to do so might be a violation of...

In the clear: Once again, official Washington is all aflutter over the prospect of “getting POTUS Trump” after special counsel Robert Mueller got eight of 18 convictions against former campaign manager Paul Manafort and a guilty plea from Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer. While news of both legal developments hitting on the same day may seem like a big blow against POTUS Trump, especially the claim that Cohen’s hush money payments to a former porn star and Playboy bunny at the direction of his former top client could amount to campaign finance violations, talk host and author Mark...

Barack Obama's presidential campaign has been fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating federal disclosure laws, Politico reports. An FEC audit of Obama for America's 2008 records found the committee failed to disclose millions of dollars in contributions and dragged its feet in refunding millions more in excess contributions. The resulting fine, one of the largest ever handed down by the FEC, is the result of a failure to disclose or improperly disclosing thousands of contributions to Obama for America during the then-senator's 2008 presidential run, documents show....

For the past few days, the media has been abuzz with the potential evidence that Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws with a buyout of the rights to a story of an affair he had a decade prior to the election. But what about Hillary Clinton's potential campaign finance law violations, where are the Big Media stories about that? For the past seven months, a complaint with the FEC has been pending, alleging a campaign finance law violation by a Hillary Clinton authorized campaign committee. Known as the Hillary Victory Fund, or HVF, the committee collected and then allegedly laundered $84...

Why are Democrats so pro open borders and pro-crime? It stands to reason to me that the cartels must be funding their campaigns. It goes further than just getting more illegals to vote. They are actually anti law inforcement, anti ICE, and pro every kind of crime and open borders. Who really benefits? Follow the money.

Backlash to President Donald Trump’s pardon of Dinesh D’Souza caused complaints of a double standard among conservatives. In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told the reporter that D’Souza faced political persecution for a crime liberal comedian Rosie O’Donnell had committed five-fold. (Cruz also claimed credit for the pardon and called D’Souza his friend.) "What’s interesting is, just a few weeks ago we saw revelations that Rosie O’Donnell apparently committed the same offense five times, five times, when she broke the identical law that Dinesh was prosecuted for," Cruz said. "I don’t recall any of those...

Would a $130,000 payment to buy a porn starÂ’s silence violate campaign-finance laws? Greetings from beautiful Orange County. WeÂ’re getting ready for the second of two Golden State events (we were in San Francisco yesterday), part of National Review InstituteÂ’s celebration of Bill BuckleyÂ’s legacy a decade after his passing.For me, the road trip is tacked on to a longer-than-usual vacation. It has ended up being the longest break I have taken from writing in many years Â— maybe since I started writing full time 15 years ago. I am grateful for the time to think at length about things...

Yes, most of the MSM has always been to the left, but there used to be some daylight between the two. In the last 5 to 10 years, though, it's simply merged with the DNC. Right now much of the time, you can't even tell the MSM's "straight news" on Trump and politics from opinion pieces. Even before seeing the classified memo, the MSM were calling its release "political" and defending Dems. They automatically take the DNC position, and that includes when they pushed the DNC line on "Russia" and pushes for Trump's impeachment though Mueller investigation has uncovered nothing.

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of my client, Alabama engineer Shaun McCutcheon, in his challenge to the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) outdated "aggregate limits," which effectively limited how many candidates any one donor could support. Anti-speech liberals railed against McCutcheon's win, arguing it would create supersized "Joint Fundraising Committees" (JFCs). In court, they claimed these JFCs would allow a single donor to cut a multimillion-dollar check, and the JFC would then route funds through dozens of participating state parties, who would then funnel it back to the final recipient. Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer claimed the Supreme...

The First Amendment gets in the way of many “progressive” goals and you often hear them say, “Sure I’m in favor of free speech, but…..” There are so many possible “buts” to complete that sentence that the First Amendment would by now just be lifeless words on parchment if it weren’t for vigilant defenders. One of those “progressive” goals is to make politics more fair by taking out private funding as much as possible. Recently the city of Seattle, fresh from curing poverty with its $15 per hour minimum wage, decided to clean up politics with what it terms its...

Mayor de Blasio was hit with over $47,000 in fines for violating campaign finance rules— including having his partially taxpayer-funded campaign pick up the tab for a makeup artist for his family and a six-figure payout to his buddy’s PR firm that appeared unwarranted. The huge sum is one of the highest fine amounts hit on any of the 2013 campaigns. The Campaign Finance Board, in a determination released Thursday, levied most of the $47,778 in fines against the mayor for what it called “impermissible” post-election spending. The $21,159 fine for that violation largely stems from a $168,750 payout to...

Part III of the undercover Project Veritas Action investigation dives further into the back room dealings of Democratic politics. It exposes prohibited communications between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization Americans United for Change. And, it’s all disguised as a duck. In this video, several Project Veritas Action undercover journalists catch Democracy Partners founder directly implicating Hillary Clinton in FEC violations. “In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground,” says Creamer in one of several exchanges.